How can speculative fiction help us imagine a future when living in a time filled with uncertainty, fear and injustice? What do we dream about? How does it sound and how does it smell? What can we touch? Touching 2022 is a virtual group exhibition where nine artists create worlds and imagine alternative realities situated in the near future. Each artist has been invited to create an interactive three-dimensional space. The spaces are interconnected by portals, and the viewers can navigate through them from a first person perspective.

- The past year we have been forced to reorient our relationship to intimacy, communication and globalization. The covid-19 pandemic has situated us in between life and death in a new way, which is affecting everybody differently. It has contributed to a societal shift where the notion of care and collective responsibility has become central; a seemingly conditional and temporary care that is balanced against continued dividends, market economy and individualism. The failures of established power structures are becoming tangible which opens up a space of critique towards the general longing of going “back to normal”. Instead of holding on to pieces of normality in a shattered world, we could try to imagine a world that reinvent itself unbound from current structures. Things have changed so fast that picturing the future within a month, a week or even just a few hours seems to be an abstract concept. With this in mind, Touching 2022 uses the spirit of science fiction and worldmaking as a tool for approaching the coming times, but instead of imagining a distant future we look at the year 2022. A near future that has the potential to carry societal structures far away from today’s present.

Organized by Magnus Andreas Hagen Olsen, Karin Keisu and Josse Thuresson

Project supported by Nordisk Kulturfond

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ae73edb7@aeaeaeae.io, Armen Avanessian, Bahar Noorizadeh, Bassem Saad & Edwin Nasr, Black Quantum Futurism, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, David Tobias Bonde Jensen, fantastic little splash, Helge Jordheim, Karin Keisu & Josse Thuresson, Kim Laybourn, Laura Op De Beke, Natasha Tontey, Nikhil Vettukattil, Room for Collective Encounters (R.C.E.), Tabita Rezaire, Tor-Finn Malum Fitje & Thomas Anthony Hill, Yin-Ju Chen

STRUKTURA is a cross-disciplinary initiative for research and practice within the framework of visual arts, media archeology, literature and philosophy. STRUKTURA is an exploration of how visual media and information technologies contribute to the ordering and production of time, where both past and future exist in a constantly malleable present. This five-month programme sprawls across virtual online environments and multiple physical venues in Oslo. It consists of exhibitions, film screenings, group readings, public event series and a club night.

Technologies shape our sense of time and constitute new arrangements of it. In effect, they produce new formal and experiential temporalities. Today, our experience of time does not merely govern our actions in the present, but influences our past and future. It has become an urgent field for political, economical and environmental struggle. Global telecommunications (internet, mobile phones, fiber optics, satellites, etc) have collapsed time and space into one another. Scientific concepts, social prejudices and media innovations have become tools for the determination and the building of cultural structures in the new-old, ruptured moment of now.

STRUKTURA investigates speculative temporalities, where time is plural, complex and fluid. The participating artists and thinkers present their own sense of futurity and pastness, by exposing concealed knowledge, penetrating time other than the present. STRUKTURA aims at creating a platform to explore relations between time and moving image; virtual, real and actual; current modes of how we instrumentalize history and memory; cultural techniques for temporal mediation. The online and offline program explores ideas of nonlinear spaces challenged by technologies, where different places and different times intersect and coexist together.

STRUKTURA is an independent project supported by Podium, K4 Gallery, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, UNKNOW, Akademirommet at Kunstnernes Hus and The Wrong Biennale for Digital Culture. Design and web development by Magnus Andreas Hagen Olsen. Graphic design by Abirami Logendran.

Curated by Lesia Vasylchenko.

Anastasia Monina

Reclining Buddha, produced by Anastasia Monina and commissioned by Field of Dreams OSLO.

Nastya Monina (b.1999, St.Petersburg, Russia) attempts to create a culture shared space, using negative stereotypes of modern Slavic culture and Anglo European culture, gender roles, sexual identity, youth culture and internet culture. These are all hieroglyphs that are longing to bring the viewer to a new space, that has a more open potentiality for a positive future.

Curated by Mitchell Bridges.

E.S.P. TV, Karen Nikgol, Yoke Collective, Josse Thuresson & Karin Keisu, Funa Ye & Beio

If we could only catch up with the wave of information… we would, at last, be in the now… to digest and comprehend [its] totality would amount to having reality on tap as if from a fantastic media control room capable of monitoring everything, everywhere, all at the same time. - Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock

As a symptom of digital culture, streaming is the emphasis which defines relations between spatial and temporal distances. While the rapid-fire absorption of media overtaking our experience of the physical world, unkNOW created a space to explore the complexities of internet culture and how we connect through the digital intimacy of performance and visual art. The event brought together works from Beijing-, Kyiv-, London-, NYC- and Oslo-based performance and media artists, incorporating broadcasts and television taping events, live stream and physical performances, media art and music, which explored power structures of hyperconnected society, televisual language, surveillance and the relationship between the human and a machine.

For unkNOW, Funa Ye & Beio produced a new episode from their ongoing live online performance program “Exhibitionist: peep stream”. It is a unique form of performance, other than common performance art, online show or TV show. The purpose of Exhibitionist series is to break the boundaries of “daily display” and ”art exhibition”, and to reduce the distance between the public and contemporary art. In our current hyper-connected society, people’s desire to “display” is everywhere - selfies, Instagram, web chat, and in its most extreme form, live stream. Funa Ye’s practice is mainly concerned with the relationship between the realities of everyday life, the perceived connection between authority and many areas of social life such as different power structure, ethnic groups, and the fictional space of propaganda for the concept of ‘perfection’ in an ideological system, and utopian landscape.

The broadcast by NYC based multimedia collective E.S.P. TV (Scott Kiernan & Victoria Keddie) focused on simulation and ASMR, signifiers of language, narrative, and sensory reaction. E.S.P. TV utilizes a mobile television studio to explore televisual language, placing a particular focus on the performativity of production itself through installations, broadcasts and live television taping events. A strong network through artist collaborations for broadcast, amassing an extensive archive detailing these explorations of performance, sound, and vision.

Yoke Collective is an artistic and curatorial project by Emily Roderick and Georgina Rowlands, whose research based practice filters contemporary identity politics, examining the position of the female body within the surveillance state, into performance and installation. The relationship between the human and the machine is constantly reframed as Yoke dualistically resists and embraces the camera's gaze. Taking an interest in the male-dominated office space and corporate sphere, Yoke Collective presented a performative installation consisting of a row of seven monitors forming a restrictive path. Combining workplace meditation and office chair exercises the performers followed dictated gesture and spoken instructions, the presence of authority moves through the work, from the ever-changing autocue monitors on the floor to the personas of instructor and worker, interchanging between the two performers, direct reference is made to relationships of corporate production and capitalist structures. A regurgitation of information occurs holding a doubled gaze between screen and performer, this durational performance aimed to explore the mindset in the office space and issues of self-help within an overworked society.

Curated by Magnus Andreas Hagen Olsen & Lesia Vasylchenko.

Benjie Cluness & Mohammed, Yasmin, Sara, Jawad, Eman, Doa'a, Maha, Marie, Osama, Mohammad, Farah, Esraa, Nagham, Ali, Marwa, Mahmoud

Home explores contrasting approaches to questions about location and dislocation, population displacement, power structures, definitions, migration and politics in relation to the home as an idea, and as a place. It in part features content from Rashedieh, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, in which camp life is documented through strategies associated with investigative journalism. This content is paired with video work Welcome Home by Benjie Cluness, where we through a 3D-rendered apartment is presented with thoughts revolving around the domestic sphere and how it’s prepared for guests and tenants.

Artist Benjie Cluness (b.1989, Shetland) lives and works in Glasgow. His work Welcome Home (2015) concerns the rise and dominance of Airbnb and the subsequent homogenisation of middle class homes around the globe. Listings must have character, but never personality. The renders were modelled on architectural designs of tenement buildings and photographs from Airbnb listings in Glasgow.

The exhibition is co-curated by Selma Schöttker (b. 1992, Norway), who spent three months working for the Palestine Committee of Norway in Rashedieh. All content from the refugee camp and its adjacent locations has been collected during this period of time, and includes sixteen interviews, one sound clip, six videos and fifty-six images, including photographs, GIFs and screenshots.

Curated by Selma Schöttker and Magnus Andreas Hagen Olsen.

Ville Kallio

GOREPLEX serves as a complex metaphor and illustrative outcome for some of the ideological and metaphysical issues that the digital sphere ruptures, negotiates and perpetuates within the magnitude of the multiplicity. Additionally, Ville’s digital painting practice and sculptural works negotiate gaps between the digital and physical space, working through intersecting symbols that generate an accelerated economy of signs and meta images.

The oceanic network of values, systems and symbolic logic that cross and converge into new physicalities of the digital sphere are reminiscent of GOREPLEX which returns the body to total tactility enclosed by the simulated world, it is body that en-frames another body - we as the viewers are the bodies consuming its body again as representatives of the analogue absorbing its own ether. There is a procession of connective tissues and networks that wash meta images through filters and digital landscapes moving and out of the real and simulated world. Perhaps the simulated world is no longer simulated but co-existing with the real as a sort of appendage. Does a network finalize and enclose or does it continue to perpetually denounce the present passing on and on again, rendered into a majestically vexed oscillating state of finite infintium?

Ville Kallio (b. 1990, lives and works in Helsinki) is an interdisciplinary artist working in the media of 3D animation, sculpture, digital drawing, and site-specific installation. Through his angst of living under eternal capitalism, his work explores violence, biotechnology, and the future of warfare through video-games like simulations and accelerated realities.

Curated by Magnus Myrtveit & Elizabeth McInnes.

Youngshin Jeon

Youngshin Jeon’s work contains Google image archiving and essay writing presented in a magazine format that questions the exhibition as a gallery space that is empty yet full, and as a publication that is simultaneously art writing and artwork.

We are a generation of self-archivists, able to search millions of images on the Internet and peruse an amazingly powerful visual tool; this is a testament to our digital age while having a traditional archival approach. This process is critically engaged with the present and shows images in a different way, as associated with a different platform. #cliché Artistic researcher

The algorithms make the Internet beyond the form of the book that not only contains stories like traditional books but also becomes a library that can be accessed for a multiplicity of books or as a gallery format for images, and other virtual objects. The Internet’s non-physical shelf, which is always sustained as empty containers indifferent to their content, is filled up by the other physical object in a virtual realm. #Google image studies

In her sculptural and video works, Youngshin Jeon (b. 1988, Seoul, South Korea) consider the condition of the audience in the white cube, which is temporary and remote from the world, and how to bridge the interface between these two worlds through the conversation between image and space. She has studied Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and holds a master degree from Oslo Academy of Fine Arts.

Curated by Magnus Andreas Hagen Olsen & Lesia Vasylchenko.

Ximena Alarcón, David Tobias Bonde Jensen, Tim Høibjerg, Josse Thuresson

There is no gentle wind. No poetic desire. Only from a safe space proposals for a better future can emerge.

In-between brings together artists who investigate how we locate ourselves in time and space in a rapidly changing world, where cultural and social structures are in flux. It’s a social, political, and geographical metaphor for the liminal state that allows fluid crossing or wavering in-between.

David Tobias Bonde Jensen’s HÆVENWEIGHS is a work-in-process on designing a video game which questions the experience of appearance of place, being and the being of things in a digital environment. Bonde Jensen is playing with the pamphlet layout by combining 3D animations as “living illustrations” and speculative fragments of text in an arrangement influenced by the theory of ergodic literature to conceptualize a reciprocal space outside physicality. Having a background in film, David Tobias Bonde Jensen utilizes video, sound, performance and new media to explore semiotics of religion, mythology and carnal spirituality and how these structures are assimilated and appropriated into current concepts of thinking.

Duping Delight by Tim Høibjerg is an ongoing image series that explores issues of the body, gender, and nature melting together and being swallowed by technology. The synthetic versus - the organic, the real versus - the unreal. A mutation occurs, aiming to amuse and bemuse the spectator. Josse Thuresson strives to disturb normative ideas about desire and identity. Mostly working with drag, text, video and installation they want to center marginalized experiences and explore strategies for queer resistance. As an artistic starting point they use personal experiences and emotions such as vulnerability and anger. Symbols for the inner and the outer, the private and the public, the soft and the hard, are recurring.

Ximena Alarcón’s practice-based research involves Deep Listening, telematic sonic improvisation using spoken word and everyday sonic environments, and the creation of online interfaces for relational listening that expand our sense of belonging and place. In PDF work On Dis-location: Listening and Re-composing with Others, she reflects on the creative process working with aspects of migration and dislocation. The article was published in Academic Journal “Reflections on Process in Sound” http://www.reflections-on-process-in-sound.net/issue-5/.

Curated by Magnus Andreas Hagen Olsen & Lesia Vasylchenko.

Emilia Curatola Fernández, Pietro Consolando, Magnus Myrtveit

Do androids dream of electric sheep? Will the future bring empathy towards AI? Is it possible to avoid a dystopian future where angry androids kill us all claiming for equal - or at least fair - treatment between computer-driven beings and humans? Materially, robot and machine abuse already exist, and no one among the upper academia says that a robot-caused apocalypse is entirely impossible, it is philosophically important to start a discussion around questions of such nature. Magnus Myrtveit’s “Killing the Apocalypse through Kindness” was a Performative Power Point Presentation (PPP), presented at Khartoum Contemporary Art Center.

Pietro Consolandi’s essay “On the Creative Role of Ideology in Shaping Societies” is an attempt to provide a definition of ideology that, departing from the Marxian one, goes past it and embodies complex systems of ideas that physically act in changing the material world by influencing human actions on an individual level and, through a number of shared rituals and codes defined - among others - by Sigmund Freud and René Girard, on the collective network.

The video work “We've Known Each Other For So Long” by sociologist and researcher in contemporary art and criticism Emilia Curatola Fernández ponders on the relationship between ideology, technology and work in our recent history - and the story will be interrupted, from time to time, by the presence of an artificial intelligence.

Curated by Magnus Andreas Hagen Olsen & Lesia Vasylchenko.